


Haunted

by especiallythezefronposter



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Brian Banner's A+ Parenting, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Codependency, Cuddling & Snuggling, Fluff and Angst, Ghost Tony, Ghosts, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Kid Bruce Banner, Kid Tony Stark, M/M, Minor Character Death, Puberty, Sad Ending, they're platonic in the first chapter but it gets romantic later on, when bruce is you know not three years old
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-31
Updated: 2017-06-11
Packaged: 2018-07-11 08:48:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7041373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/especiallythezefronposter/pseuds/especiallythezefronposter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony Stark, fifteen, dies in a car accident along with his parents in 1961 and drifts through the frozen steets of New York until finally, on the outskirts of Hempstead, he finds a house to haunt. A house where, eight years later, Robert Bruce Banner is born.</p><p>(Or, Bruce grows up with a guardian ghost and it's okay. Everything is okay.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Four

**Author's Note:**

> I'm trying to get myself to finish some of the Bruce/Tony WIPs I have sitting on my computer (so expect me to be more active than usual). This one is going to be three more chapters after this, I think, so I hope after this first chapter you'll be patient enough to wait for those. Enjoy!

The first time his daddy shouts at him, Bruce is almost four years old. He's in the cramped living room, playing with his mommy's red shoe and an empty glass that smells a little like the first-aid kit as daddy watches TV. He has a few real toys, but daddy had taken those away after stepping on one of Bruce's dice and hurting his foot. The glass rolls away and he crawls past the TV to get to it, because he isn't allowed to stand up in front of the TV. The remote feels weird under his knee and he isn't really sure what it is until he looks down at it, surprised.

Bruce doesn't move and behind him, the channel changes from his daddy's angry movie to something else, something with laughter. He stumbles when daddy pushes him to get to the remote and that's when the shouting starts. Bruce sits up but doesn't stand and rubs his teary eyes with two little fists. The noise of his daddy's anger makes him cry and he's scared like he is at night sometimes, when daddy comes to turn off his nightlight and he isn't allowed to turn it back on, even when he's sure there's a monster in the shadows. 

His daddy squeezes his upper arm too hard as he uses it to drag Bruce to his room. The door slams shut and he's cold right away. His mommy told him it's going to start snowing soon and the house opposite them has already hung their Christmas lights, that's how cold it is. 

His mommy won't be home until after he has to go to bed and his daddy won't come back, not even to give Bruce his blankets back after taking them this morning when Bruce was too tired to get out of bed, so Bruce climbs up onto his dresser to look out of the window above it. He watches the lights of the opposite house and, as he does a lot of nights, waits for his mommy to appear at the end of the street and slowly make her way towards their house.

'Bruce?', someone says from behind him. It's a voice that sounds familiar, cracked and faded like the floorboards and soft like his mommy's cheeks. He turns and there's a boy standing in the middle of his room. He's wearing a black suit with a white shirt, but no tie like the one his daddy used to wear back when he still went to work every day. He looks tired and a little weird, but Bruce doesn't mind.

'Are you okay?', the boy continues. 'Can you come down from the dresser?' His voice softens and he blinks. 'I'm not supposed to be here. I wasn't supposed to be there. But you should really come down. It’s cold up there.' He blinks again and puts one foot a little behind him like he's trying to walk backwards. 'This is all wrong.'

Bruce nods and carefully climbs down the open drawers. The boy winces, but Bruce doesn't know why. Sometimes his mommy does that, too, without any reason. 

The boy's voice is warm, and Bruce remembers it vaguely from when he was a little baby. Hands that weren't his mommy’s reaching into his crib to fix his blankets and stroke his hair, soft words he didn't understand yet. It feels a bit like a dream, and maybe it was.

The boy spreads his arms and Bruce walks into them without hesitation. It's all warmth that picks him up and holds him close, the boy telling him he's so special and he doesn't deserve to be hurt at all.

Bruce puts his tiny hand on the boy's cheek. 'Don't be sad,' he says. People say this on TV, in the movies his mommy watched when daddy was at work. The boy smiles, but he still looks sad.

He walks towards the bed and, very carefully, lies down, Bruce still in his arms. 'I'm Tony,' he says. 'I wasn't supposed to be there,' he mumbles, an afterthought. 'This is all wrong.'

Bruce snuggles close to him, burying his head in the side of Tony's neck. Not even his mommy is this warm.

'I'll keep you warm, okay?', Tony says and Bruce opens his eyes only long enough to nod and see that the Christmas lights shining through the window leave orange spots on the wall, passing through Tony like he isn't there.

By the morning there's nothing left of Tony but his warmth.

-

After Christmas, Bruce starts going to school. Sometimes his daddy forgets to come pick him up and he has to stay until his mommy comes back from work. Sometimes he's glad, because his daddy shouts at him more and more and this morning, he has taken his blankets again.

Today daddy does come to pick him up, but when they get home he tells Bruce to go to his room and locks the door behind him. Bruce stands by his bed, listening to the footsteps going down the stairs and wondering what he did wrong.

He finishes a drawing he made at school, though the only two pencils that he has in his room are green and purple, so that he has to draw himself beside his pink-skinned parents with green skin and purple clothes.

He starts getting hungry as he makes his hair purple, too, but daddy doesn't come to unlock his door even after it's gotten dark. Bruce sits on his dresser to look out of the window and then lies in his bed, clutching his lumpy teddy bear.

'Bruce?', he hears and there's Tony, looking at him quietly from the middle of the room. There's a plate in his hands and he sets in down on the desk behind himself, careful not to put it on Bruce's drawing. 'I got you food.'

Bruce gets up to inspect the plate, which indeed has on it fried chicken and broccoli. 'Oh,' he says and when Tony holds out a fork for him, he sits at his desk and starts eating. The fork is made for grown-ups, and Bruce handles it clumsily, even though he tries really hard to make it work.

'Shit,' Tony says when he notices. 'This is all wrong,' he mumbles, voice trembling. He reaches out a hand for the fork carefully. 'May I?', he asks and when Bruce nods, he uses the fork to chop Bruce's food to bits and brings it towards Bruce's mouth, focused like he's sure he'll screw up.

Bruce can almost make out the outline of the dresser behind Tony, the corner of the window that makes part of Tony's face look slightly darker.

When Bruce has had enough, he takes the fork from Tony, struggles to get a piece of broccoli onto it and holds it out to Tony.

Tony smiles, but he doesn't look happy. 'I already ate,' he says.

-

Bruce accidentally lets his father's glass fall off the table and it breaks, spilling the first aid kit smell all over the floor. He's already in pyjamas, and when his daddy shoves him away he falls into the stingy bits of glass. His knees hurt, and when his daddy pulls him up, his feet start to hurt, too, but he can only try to keep up as his daddy pulls him up the stairs. The door locks behind him and he sobs quietly, moving to sit on his bed so that he doesn't have to stand on his aching soles. He rubs his eyes, chest shaking with sobs.

When he looks up, Tony is kneeling in front of him. There's a first aid kit beside him, but first he only holds his hand against Bruce's shoulder, and warmth spreads through his body even as it makes Tony look a little less there.

'I'll have to take out the glass, first,' Tony says quietly. 'They took the glass out of my skin, too. But I wasn't supposed to be there,' he adds.

Bruce nods, still crying and he whimpers when Tony gets to work at his feet. It stings, and it's the kind of warm that isn't nice. He focuses on the sound of the pieces of glass dropping into a little bowl Tony brought, and on Tony's eyelashes. 

When he's calm enough, and Tony has moved on to his knees, which hurt a little less, Bruce starts to get bored. Every time he moves Tony tuts softly, without looking away from his bloody fingers on Bruce's bloody knees, but eventually he finds that Tony doesn't mind if he moves his hands and so they end up in Tony's hair, which is soft and warm like when his mommy puts his pyjamas on the radiator before she helps him pull them on.

'Hey,' Tony says, and he stops to look up at Bruce, bandages in hand. 'Have you told anyone about me?'

Bruce shakes his head. It feels a little like he's done something wrong.

'Good. That's great. I don't want you to tell anyone, okay? They'll get angry. I'm not supposed to be here.'

Bruce nods solemnly. He doesn't tell Tony that his daddy will get angry anyway.

'This is all wrong,' Tony says.

Bruce keeps his hands in Tony's hair even when Tony finishes bandaging up his wounds and pulls him down into the bed. There's blankets tonight and Tony wraps Bruce up in them contentedly, making sure there's no places left where the cold can get in. 

By the morning, Tony is still there, Bruce's hands wrapped in his hair only barely visible through his forehead.

Tony hugs him tightly and kisses the side of his head before he lets go and then Bruce is alone, his father climbing the stairs to come get him out of bed.

-

Spring is almost over the next time he sees Tony. He's been sent to bed without food and his parents have been fighting about it. He flinches at every shout he hears from downstairs, every thud and crash, and focuses almost forcefully on the wooden train and its neat wooden tracks. He pushes the thing around in a figure eight, over the bridge, then under it, then rearranges the pieces into a circle.

Tony kneels down beside him and sets down a plate of food - mac 'n cheese. This time he's brought a small spoon.

Bruce looks up from his train and grabs the spoon right out of Tony's hand. It's already past his bedtime and he hasn't eaten a thing since lunch. Tony puts a hand on his back and tells him to eat slowly, so Bruce makes an effort to chew more than once and wait two seconds for his next bite after swallowing.

Meanwhile Tony studies the train tracks and asks Bruce gently if he can change them a little.

Bruce nods and by the time he's done eating, Tony has managed to prop the tracks up on his little backpack and the bottom drawer of his dresser. He waits until Bruce is paying attention and then puts the train at the top of the tracks, letting it go with a final push and making Bruce grin at how fast it rolls down.

They play with the trains for a while, finding more creative ways to arrange the tracks. Then there's a scream and a crash from downstairs and all of the fun is gone. Bruce bursts into tears.

Tony pulls him close, wrapping him up in his arms and rocks them back and forth gently, right there on the floor. Only later, when Bruce is already asleep does he move them to the bed. When his daddy wakes him up, Tony isn't there anymore, but the bed beside him is still warm.  
-  
He doesn't see Tony again until his fourth birthday in December, the day after his mommy finds out that his daddy broke his arm while she was working yesterday, the day she decides that they are leaving.

Tony helps him pack the stuff his mommy hasn't had the time to put away yet. He doesn't say anything, but when they're done, he kneels and hugs Bruce for the longest time. He kisses Bruce's cheeks and his hair and his ears, which makes Bruce giggle. Tony smiles a little, too, but he looks sad and tired like mommy even with the corners of his mouth turned up.

He hugs Bruce again and then his mom comes in and Tony is gone.

-

Only an hour later she's dead. Bruce can't look at her face, which is covered in blood. Her shoes, too, are red, but that's how they're supposed to be, so he focuses on them until the police comes to take him away.

They ask him questions and he can see his daddy crying and they tell him it's an accident and they're so sorry and she's in a good place and then they leave him in the waiting room with a box of crayons. He draws his mother, then he draws Tony. An officer comes to sit with him and tries to talk to him about loss.

-

It's almost morning when daddy takes him back home. He doesn't have to go to school, his daddy says, and instead he spends the day in his room, watching someone scrub all of the red off of the sidewalk from his window.

-

The next day, when he tells the teacher that his mommy is dead, she tuts and says it's disrespectful to say things like that if they aren't true.

-

A week later, when his father has come to the school, she tells Bruce that she is sorry for his loss and tells all the kids to sign his cast.

-

Tony is there sometimes, after Bruce has waited and waited for his mommy to appear at the end of the street and slowly make her way towards their house, after he has crawled off the dresser and laid down in his bed crying. Tony is there, holding him from behind, tall enough to curl around Bruce and cover his back from head to toe, his shivers fading as Tony's warmth seeps into his bones. He can see his own fingers through Tony's curled around his, but when he wakes up, he's covered in blankets and his cheeks aren't sticky anymore.

-

He will only later realise how important Tony becomes to him at this time. He's the one who prepares Bruce's lunch when his daddy forgets to make it. He's the one who sticks newspapers in the too big pair of shoes his daddy bought him when his other pair practically fell apart. He brings Bruce food on the bad nights, and keeps him warm when his blankets are gone. He's more present than he was before, more opaque and more often. He combs Bruce's hair in the morning and puts him in bath in the evenings. 

His dad doesn't notice, only sleeps and drinks and sometimes cries. Tony cleans up his messes, sometimes even cooks (slightly charred) dinner. His dad doesn't care, Tony flicks out of existence when he's there and Bruce doesn't tell his dad about him, as Tony told him to.

-

Tony is always so tired, but slowly he stops disappearing so much. He's there every day and sleeps in Bruce's bed by night, still almost entirely visible in the morning. He kisses and blows at Bruce's ear until Bruce giggles and then tells him to get out of bed, helping Bruce get washed and dressed while occasionally flicking to the kitchen to make breakfast and prepare Bruce's lunch. His dad doesn't get out of bed to wake Bruce anymore and Tony is probably the one who makes sure he even bothers to wake up to go get Bruce from school.

-

Bruce is only four and his mother is dead, but he has a boy who loves him, who lets Bruce sit on the counter while he does the dishes and blows foam onto his face, who sings for him once, when Bruce can’t sleep, who doesn’t always make sense, but is warm and soft and gentle. Bruce is only four and his mother is dead, but he is safe.


	2. Eight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It becomes like this: Tony takes care of Bruce and Bruce takes care of Tony.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I finished both my last exam and the next chapter today!
> 
> Warning: the child abuse, neglect and alcoholism tags still apply!

For his birthdays Tony gives Bruce faded National Geographics and The American Naturalists, which he reads to Bruce until Bruce starts to read them himself, struggling his way through three and four syllable words and asking Tony what they mean. When he turns eight, Tony gives him a mathematics book with Bruce’s dad’s name on the inside cover.

Tony helps Bruce with his homework every night and after, they work on math problems from the book. They’re too advanced for Bruce, but he likes to watch as Tony frowns over them, asks Bruce to solve the easy parts of the problem, bites the end of Bruce’s pencil (they’re solving the problems in green, purple is for writing down the meanings of words from the magazines). When it’s time for Bruce to go to bed and Tony still hasn’t solved the problem of the day, he says, ‘I was going to go to MIT, the year I died. This used to be easy.’

Bruce doesn’t fully understand what Tony means by this, but he looks sad, so Bruce hugs him as best as he can. Tony smiles and picks him up, carrying him to bed.

-

Once, on a Sunday, Tony brings Bruce a page torn out of a magazine. It says ‘for the kids’ on top and shows an image of a tiny blue rocket ship.

‘I found all the stuff we need for this,’ Tony says while Bruce reads the text right under the title of the article. He can read all of the words, but he doesn’t understand some of them.

He looks up at Tony ‘Can we fly to space in it?’

‘I think it’s too small,’ Tony says. ‘Maybe we could fit a drawing into it, though. It’s not going to get all the way to space, but maybe someone will find it.’

‘If we had a really big rocket, would you go to space with me?’, Bruce asks. Bruce can imagine it, the two of them, safe and away from everyone who wants to hurt them.

Tony only smiles. ‘What colour do you want the rocket to be? I found all these different colours of paper. You can pick whichever you like.’ He spreads them out on the bed, the colours giving the skin of his hands a slight rainbow glow.

‘This is all wrong,’ Tony says, softly. He still does this sometimes. Bruce asked him once why, but Tony didn’t know what he was talking about and he started to frown, so Bruce ruffled Tony’s hair like Tony always does to his until Tony started to tickle him as a counterattack. 

‘Orange,’ Bruce says immediately. That’s what Tony looks when like when he’s warm and fading, when Bruce is safe. ‘And purple?’ Bruce isn’t sure he likes purple, but it’s a colour that feels right.

Tony grins. ‘Perfect! I’ll draw the shapes and then you cut them out, okay?’

So Tony sits down at Bruce’s desk with sheets of orange and purple paper and Bruce’s green pencil and Bruce lies on his belly on the floor and reads through the bottle rocket tutorial out loud. Tony helps him out whenever he comes across a difficult word.

While Bruce cuts out the shapes, Tony goes to the bathroom to partially fill a bottle with water, then puts a cork in the bottle’s opening and puts the needle of a bicycle pump through it. When Bruce is done cutting, Tony attaches his handiwork to the bottle with tape, so that the bottle has three purple fins and an orange tip. It really looks like a rocket.

‘Do you want to attach a drawing to the rocket, so that someone will find it?’, Tony asks.

Bruce rummages through his drawings and finds one of Tony and him, where they’re both smiling and sitting in a boat far away from this house and Bruce’s father. Tony sits down at Bruce’s desk for a moment to write something on the back of it, then tapes it to the rocket.

Tony carries the rocket downstairs, Bruce following behind him. He stops at the edge of the porch and offers the rocket to Bruce. ‘Will you take it outside?’, he asks. ‘I can’t leave the porch.’

‘Why not?’

Tony only shrugs, his smile strange.

He tells Bruce to get far enough away in the garden and to put the rocket on one of the chairs. Bruce does and then pumps as Tony tells him to, until their rocket is shooting upwards and disappearing over the fence around the garden.

Tony laughs and starts clapping and Bruce feels giddy as he runs back towards him, carrying the pump clumsily.

Tony picks him up and spins him around in a hug.

‘That was fun, wasn’t it?’

Later that night Bruce wonders if maybe they could build a spaceship right by the porch, so that Tony could board it without having to go into the garden.

-

‘My mother was so beautiful,’ Tony says.

It’s dark and Bruce is supposed to be asleep, but he woke up from a nightmare, trying not to cry because his dad doesn’t like it when he cries, and Tony’s there holding onto him like he was when Bruce fell asleep. Bruce is curled up against Tony’s chest, Tony’s head pressed tightly into his shoulder.

‘She’s dead, like yours. I saw her die, too. But that’s not what I want to remember. I thought about when she died so much that I was afraid I’d forget all the rest.’ For a moment he’s quiet and he leans back to wipe away Bruce’s tears. ‘She didn’t cook a lot but she was so good at it. She made the pasta herself. Have you ever eaten homemade pasta? We could try making it. She made this amazing sauce and invited her friends over. She loved her friends a lot, I think. She couldn’t sing, but she liked singing, and she played the piano. She let me paint her nails. She was so lovable that even my father loved her, and he never loved anyone. When the car crashed -’ Tony stops speaking abruptly and strokes Bruce’s neck.

Bruce plays with Tony’s hair as he always does. Tony is warm, but still shivers.

‘Do you want to tell me about your mom, so that we won’t forget about her?’, he asks.

Bruce isn’t sure what he’s supposed to say. His teacher asked him about his mom on mother’s day last year, because he was crying, and he didn’t know what to say then, either. ‘Sometimes when she comes home really late and I’m already in bed, she comes into my room and holds me. Sometimes she cries.’

Tony’s arms wrap around him tighter, one hand cradling Bruce’s head, and Tony buries his face even deeper into Bruce’s shoulder. ‘I’m so sorry, Bruce. I love you so much,’ he says, his words muffled in Bruce’s pyjamas.

‘I love you, too, Tony,’ Bruce says, muffled in Tony’s hair.

-

Bruce’s dad still yells at him sometimes, and pushes him and says he never wanted Bruce in the first place.

Normally Bruce sees it coming, though.

Now, his father just throws open the door to his room while Bruce and Tony are reading at the desk. Just like that Tony’s gone, flicks out of the room like a candle blown out.

‘If you hadn’t been so fucking weak. If you had been a strong kid, your mother would still be here. You don’t even deserve to be her son. She’s Rebecca, not your mother. I loved her and you killed her. You killed her you –‘ 

He throws his glass at Bruce and it shatters against the desk. None of the glass cuts into Bruce’s skin, but the heavy bottom of the glass bounces against his chin. He starts crying.

His father throws his bottle, too, and it flies hard against Bruce’s leg, staying whole. Brown liquid leaks out of it and forms a little puddle under Bruce’s chair.

‘You are a monster. You are a monster and you took her from me and you never loved her.’ He slams the door when he leaves and stomps down the stars. Bruce flinches with every step his father takes.

And then Tony is kneeling beside him. He rights the bottle so that no liquid spills from it anymore and wraps his arms tightly around Bruce. ‘None of that is true,’ he whispers. ‘I swear. It’s all lies. He’s just drunk. You’re not a monster. Bruce, I love you so much, none of that is true.’ Bruce keeps crying and Tony keeps whispering things to him even as he carefully lays down in bed, Bruce still in his arms.

The first aid kit smell, which Tony told him once is the smell of alcohol, doesn’t go away for a while.

-

When Bruce comes back from school, Tony is waiting for him in his room. ‘Close the door,’ he says. ‘Look what I found!’

It’s a wide wooden box sitting in the middle of the floor, with a black, round disc on top. Beside the disc is a skinny iron thing, like an arm.

‘It’s a turntable! I had one of these before I died, and I found really cool records in the attic!’ Tony is really excited, and it makes Bruce smile despite not completely understanding what’s going on.

‘Look,’ Tony says and he puts the little iron arm so that it’s finger (which is a needle) pokes right against the black disk. Tony does something else with the box and then music comes from it, something rhythmic and a little fast. Bruce smiles wider because of how happy Tony is.

‘We can’t put it too loud, but you can dance to any kind of music, right?’ Tony jumps onto Bruce’s bed and holds his hand out to help Bruce climb on, too. ‘Do you dance a lot. Do you do that in school?’

Tony starts swinging his hips and does something with his arms that looks really silly and makes Bruce laugh. ‘Come on, Bruce, we’re having a dance party, so you have to dance!’

Bruce imitates Tony’s movements, swinging his hips exaggeratedly and waving his arms. Tony laughs. ‘That’s it! Who knew you’d be such a great dancer? You’re a natural at this!’

Bruce makes up all kinds of weird dance moves and only repeats the ones that make Tony laugh out loud. Tony only stops dancing to replace the record or to pick Bruce up and spin him around.

After, they lie on the bed together to catch their breath and don’t stop smiling for the rest of the night.

-

‘You said you are dead. I don’t understand.’

They’re having dinner in the kitchen. Normally Tony does the dishes while Bruce eats, but Tony hates doing the dishes, so mostly he just lets them pile up until Bruce offers to help dry them off.

Now he’s sitting on the chair next to Bruce, trying to make a tower out of toothpicks and peas.

‘It means that my parents and I were driving in a car, and then the car spun out of control like they sometimes do in movies. And then we were all dead. But I woke up and I looked at my own dead body and at my parents’ dead bodies and I walked away.’ 

Bruce doesn’t ask why his parents didn’t do the same thing. It seems to him very logical that little boys can live when everyone else dies. Tony can survive a car wreck, Bruce can survive his father. Their parents can’t. This is how the world is.

After a moment, Tony continues. I followed the ambulances for a while. They didn’t put the sirens on because they couldn’t save us anyway. They put us in a morgue, a mortician took all the glass out of our skin and cleaned the wounds. My mom had this really big wound in her stomach and it took a while before it stopped bleeding completely.’

Tony is quiet for a while, then looks at Bruce like he only notices him now. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘Go bring your dad a plate of food, okay?’

-

When Bruce wakes up, not so long after he went to sleep, Tony isn’t there, so Bruce goes looking for him.

He can hear his voice when he’s going down the stairs and stops. Tony sounds weird, not friendly. His father’s voice is low when he answers, so Bruce creeps down a couple more steps.

‘- here to kill me? Because I killed her?’, his father says.

‘Did you?’, unfriendly Tony asks.

‘She was trying to leave.’

‘Are you sober right now?’

‘Yes.’

‘Will you stop hurting Bruce?’

‘There’s something wrong with him.’

‘He’s just a kid.’

‘When I drink it’s different. I can’t think right. I feel like I gotta take the bad outta him before it takes root.’

‘He isn’t bad. If you spent just one second with him without yelling at him, you’d know that.’

There is a silence, in which his father says something too quiet for Bruce to hear. Then unfriendly Tony speaks again. ‘He doesn’t deserve this.’

‘How would you know?’

‘He’s your son!’

Again there’s a silence that Tony eventually fills. ‘My father was like you. He drank too much and he hated me and _that’s_ what took root in me! The only bad in Bruce is the bad you’re putting there.’

Tony is silent, then speaks again. ‘Please, you have to stop drinking. It will make everything better.’

‘Will it?’

‘You have to try. For Bruce.’

‘I can’t do it.’

‘I’ll empty all of your bottles. All you have to do is not buy new ones.’

‘You think it’s that easy?’

There’s no answer.

Bruce hears noise in the kitchen, bottles clinking against each other, then nothing.

Tony comes from up the stairs, from out of Bruce’s room, where he must have flicked to directly from the kitchen. ‘Come on,’ he says and he picks Bruce up, hugging him tight before he carries him back to his room.

‘Am I bad?’, Bruce asks into Tony’s shoulder. His heart is racing and he wants to hide.

‘Of course not,’ Tony says, kissing Bruce’s hair. ‘There’s nothing wrong with you.’

-

It becomes like this: Tony takes care of Bruce and Bruce takes care of Tony.

Tony puts Bruce in bath and reads him every newspaper and book he can find around the house, he blows raspberries on Bruce’s tummy when Bruce doesn’t want to sleep and soothes him after nightmares. He sings sometimes, mostly when he thinks Bruce isn’t listening. He helps Bruce with his homework and encourages him to practice his handwriting. He tells him he doesn’t deserve it when the kids at school are mean to him and ruffles his hair when Bruce doesn’t want to get out of bed early in the morning. They have tickling fights and sleep close together and laugh and laugh and laugh.

Bruce holds Tony’s hand when Tony suddenly stops walking in the middle of the stairs, skin cold, and guides him on, not sure what’s happening, even though this has happened before. He gets him to lay down in the bed and puts all of the blankets over him and lies down on top of him and holds on to Tony’s hair. Tony doesn’t react to his name when he gets like this. But Bruce kisses his cheeks and his eyes and his forehead and blows raspberries against his skin and blows into his ears until Tony, very slowly, comes back. Tony smiles at him as he starts to get warmer and more there and reaches up to ruffle Bruce hair. Bruce wants to cry because he’s relieved, because Tony went cold and still like his mother, but now he’s back. Bruce’s lip trembles but Tony tickles him and tickles him and they laugh and laugh and laugh.


	3. Fourteen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bruce keeps bringing it up, even though Tony doesn’t want to talk about it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so, so sorry for the wait! It's been almost a year by now, so to everyone who's stuck around and who let me know they still want to read this story, thank you so much! That really means a lot to me!  
> I'm hoping to post the next and final chapter before the end of July, hopefully you will enjoy this one in the meantime!
> 
> (the warnings for child abuse and neglect still apply, there's also a short discussion of homophobia)

‘Do you remember what you always used to say?’, Bruce asks. Tony and him are in the kitchen. His father is asleep upstairs. He’s asleep most of the time these says.

‘What do you mean, like that it’s going to be okay or something?’

Bruce jots down another answer on his maths homework. He doesn’t get how they expect any fourteen year old to be challenged by this.

‘No, like “This is all wrong,” and “I wasn’t supposed to be there.” You used to say that all the time.’

Tony frowns, looking up from the bills he’s been worrying about for the last few hours. ‘I’ve never said that before.’ He scribbles something in his notebook. Bruce reads it sideways. It says “college fund” with a very big question mark. Tony puts and arrow beside it.

‘Yes you have,’ he insists. ‘When I was young, you used to say it all the time.’ Bruce has a good memory, even then there’s the possibility that he remembers some details wrong. Misremembering Tony’s favourite two phrases, though? Not a chance.

‘No I didn’t. Make your homework.’ This is what Tony always does when they have disagreements. He’s still the oldest. He knows best. If he doesn’t want to argue, he just points out that there’s still other stuff for Bruce to do. There’s always stuff to do.

Bruce scoffs, but gets back to his maths assignment. 

‘Why would I even say that?’, Tony says, when Bruce has already finished his maths homework and moved on to English. 

Bruce shrugs. He’s always wondered why Tony said it, why he looked so lost while he did. ‘I don’t know. That’s why I brought it up.’

‘I never said that,’ Tony repeats. He doesn’t sound like he’s trying to win an argument anymore. He sounds like the argument is very much over.

Bruce drops his pen. English is definitely more of a challenge then maths. ‘Okay, fine. I made it up. That makes more sense. I won’t bring it up again.’

Tony sighs. He looks at Bruce is a way that makes him feel weird. That makes his stomach do the thing it does when he falls unexpectedly. ‘Don’t be an ass.’

‘Don’t say “ass”,’ Bruce says, tone petulant. Tony keeps swearing, but when Bruce does it, the teachers always tell him not to. He heard them talking about it once, about how one of them thinks that an older kid, maybe a brother, might be teaching Bruce cuss words, some no-good kid that cheats at tests and steals other kids’ lunch money. He doesn’t want them to think of Tony like that.

Tony sighs. ‘I need you to go to the store. We don’t have any frozen vegetables left and I don’t think your dad is gonna get up anytime soon.’

-

Bruce loves bedtime. He gets into his pyjamas and brushes his teeth while Tony gets into the bed, so that it’s already warm once Bruce joins him.

They lie pressed against each other, holding each other tight. Tony likes combing through Bruce’s hair with his fingers. Bruce likes to nuzzle Tony’s shoulder.

His dad decided a while ago that he wanted to sleep in Bruce’s room from now on, so Bruce and Tony sleep in the big bed. Bruce helped Tony turn the mattress over and Tony washed all the sheets by hand, then had Bruce put them outside to dry. Tony washed Bruce’s dad’s pillow, too, but put his mother’s pillow in a box on top of the closet, so that a part of her, however tiny, can still stay with them. There’s the tombstone, too, of course, but Bruce hasn’t been to visit it in a while.

The bed is bigger, but they still stick together the entire night. Tony’s always been right there, right with Bruce all night, almost all his life. He doesn’t think he can sleep without him anymore. He doesn’t really want to anyways.

Especially with the nightmares. Tony is gentle when Bruce wakes up shivering. Bruce tries to cover his face, tries to avoid the next blow, but Tony whispers ‘It’s me, Bruce, it’s Tony,’ and touches Bruce’s jaw until Bruce finally starts to get his breathing right.

‘I shouldn’t be getting these anymore,’ Bruce whispers. ‘I’m fourteen, I –‘

Tony’s eyes shimmer in the dark. His hands move from Bruce’s jaw to his hair. ‘I don’t think nightmares have an age limit.’

‘They’re for little kids,’ Bruce insists. He doesn’t really talk to a lot of people in his class, but he’s sure none of them have nightmares.

‘Don’t worry. You’re still a tiny little kid,’ Tony says, stretching out the ‘i’ in ‘tiny’. Bruce can tell from his tone that he’s making fun.

‘You’re not much older than I am,’ Bruce objects. Then he realises: ‘I don’t really know how old you are.’

‘Fifteen,’ Tony says. Bruce can hear the smile in his voice. He traces lines on Tony’s back in the dark.

‘You’re a tiny little kid, too, then. Do you ever have nightmares?’

‘No, ‘m too busy making sure you don’t have yours,’ Tony murmurs into his hair.

‘I’ll take care of you, if you get them,’ Bruce says quietly. He hugs Tony a little tighter. ‘But I don’t know if you can get nightmares if you don’t sleep.’

He can almost hear Tony’s frown. ‘I sleep.’

‘No you don’t.’

Tony leans away from him a little, as if to look at him better despite the darkness. ‘Why wouldn’t I sleep?’

Bruce touches Tony’s chest. There’s no heartbeat underneath his ribcage. Bruce only realised that a couple weeks ago. ‘When I wake up, you’re always awake. I’ve never seen you sleep before. Do you ever dream?’

Tony takes Bruce’s hand, holds it against his chest. ‘No. But it’s normal not to remember sleeping. That’s the point.’

Bruce shrugs. He pecks Tony on the cheek. He knows that he’s too big for kisses, but at night it seems to matter less. ‘Let’s just go back to sleep okay?’

-

Bruce is fourteen when he wakes up with an erection for the first time. He doesn’t really know what to do about it, so he goes into the bathroom and just goes about his morning routine hoping it will go away. It goes away in the shower eventually, but when Tony just walks into the room, something he does often, without it ever having been a problem before, Bruce yells at him that it’s time he starts respecting Bruce’s privacy.

-

‘You always used to fade,’ Bruce says. He’s sitting on the floor of the garage with Tony. There hasn’t been a car there for years. It’s just filled with junk. They’re trying to figure out what things are still functional enough to sell and which ones they might be able to take apart for scrap metal, which is worth money, too.

Tony isn’t mad at him for yelling this morning, but it’s clear that he isn’t as chipper as he normally is. He picks at a Crock Pot that Bruce has never seen in their house before and looks up at Bruce when he speaks.

Bruce twirls a big, decorated serving spoon in his hand. ‘I could see trough you and then you’d fade away little by little. Or did I make that up, too?’

Tony looks down at his hands. ‘I don’t know. I don’t remember.’

-

When they’re ready to go to bed, Bruce lays down on the other side of it. Tony scoots over to him, but Bruce shakes his head and turns away.

‘We’re too old,’ Bruce says quietly. ‘It’s not normal.’

Tony’s face is hard to read before he turns off the lights, but he doesn’t say anything.

-

The next time he wakes up from a nightmare, Tony tries to touch him, but Bruce pushes him away.

-

Bruce’s dad decides to leave his room just when Bruce is coming up the stairs, which inevitably leads to a fight. Tony gets in between them, but not before there’s blood on Bruce’s face.

It doesn’t happen as often anymore, and really Bruce is used to it. It was way worse when he didn’t understand what was going on yet. Now he just sighs and prods at his nose to check if it’s broken. It isn’t.

Tony helps him patch up his split lip and the wound where his father’s wedding ring got caught on the skin of Bruce’s eyebrow. Bruce holds frozen peas to his cheek.

‘Girls like it when guys look like this,’ Tony says. ‘When you look like a bad boy.’

‘I doubt it,’ Bruce mumbles. 

They’ve been sleeping apart for a couple of weeks now. They still touch a lot; it’s a habit that’s hard to break. Tony does it most, putting a hand on Bruce’s shoulder when they’re walking around the house, putting his head in Bruce’s lap when they’re sitting on the couch, touching his feet to Bruce’s at the kitchen table. 

Bruce catches himself at it, too. It’s a little annoying, especially because he’s so used to it. He doesn’t think twice about touching Tony’s face or his hair while he’s waiting for him to finish cleaning Bruce’s wounds. It takes a conscious effort not to do it now.

Tony shrugs. ‘There any girls you like at school?’ He keeps his eyes steadily on Bruce’s eyebrow. There’s something strange about the way his mouth twists.

Now it’s Bruce’s turn to shrug. ‘None of them are like you.’

The girls in his class hate maths and sometimes make fun of Bruce because he can’t see very well. Tony says he’s saving up for glasses, but that it might take a few more months.

‘But are any of them pretty? Do you want to kiss any of them?’

‘Ellie is pretty, and Anna is, too, but I don’t want to kiss them.’ Actually he sort of does want to, but he doesn’t think either of them wants to kiss him back, and he doesn’t want to kiss them as much as he wants to kiss Tony.

Tony finishes patching up his brow and puts his stuff away in the first-aid kit. Then he starts reorganising everything in it. It doesn’t take long. There used to be a lot more stuff then there is now, but Bruce has had a lot of wounds throughout his life, there’s not much stuff left in the kit.

‘You know that no one talks to Timmy anymore?’, he says eventually. He’s been thinking about it a lot. ‘Because Ellie’s mother has said that his brother is a homosexual. So Ellie isn’t allowed to talk to him anymore, and no one else really wants to, either. You know what ‘homosexual’ means?’

It takes Tony a while to look up from the first aid kit, but when he does, he nods.

‘Timmy’s brother likes to kiss other boys. But Timmy says it’s going to be okay. They’ve sent him to conversion therapy. I don’t know what that is.’

‘Me neither.’

‘I don’t want to go to conversion therapy.’

This is when Tony would normally touch him, but instead he shrinks away, like he’s worried this is his fault. ‘You don’t have to go. No one’s gonna find out.’

‘But what if they can just see it? How did they know about Timmy’s brother? Maybe they just saw it.’ So far, no one seems to be giving Bruce the kind of looks they give Timmy, but maybe it takes a while to notice. Maybe in a couple weeks they’ll see.

‘He probably kissed a boy where someone else could see him.’ Tony can’t look at Bruce, something that isn’t often the case. ‘We’re – no one’s gonna see us.’

Bruce has tried to kiss Tony before. Five times. The first time was when he was twelve and he’d read a book from the library in which a man kissed his wife every day when he came home and he tried to kiss Tony when he came home from school just like in the book. The fifth time has been months by now, before they started sleeping apart. Tony pushed him away each time, looking panicked.

He tries again now. He gently tilts Tony’s head up with a finger and presses his lips to Tony’s. He leans back and waits, but Tony doesn’t push him away.

He kisses Tony again and Tony kisses back. It’s clumsy and probably all wrong, but it doesn’t matter, because it’s exhilarating, too.

-

They start sleeping closer together again and sometimes they kiss and sometimes they sleep apart. 

No one at school seems to be able to tell that every now and then Bruce kisses another boy. When he tells Tony, he seems relieved.

-

‘You are fifteen, right?’, Bruce says, a couple of weeks later. He’s working on geography homework at the kitchen table. Tony is peeling potatoes.

‘Yeah,’ Tony says, turning to lean against the counter. ‘You know that.’

Bruce frowns a little. So does Tony. He knows by now what the subject is going to be. Bruce keeps bringing it up, even though Tony doesn’t want to talk about it.

‘But when I was little, when my mom was still alive, you were fifteen, too, right?’

There’s so many things about Tony that are strange, but that is definitely the strangest.

‘Yeah,’ Tony breathes. He sounds like he’s only thinking about that now for the first time.

Bruce colours Washington D.C. yellow on the map he has to complete. ‘When weren’t you fifteen?’

‘When I –‘ Tony trails off. He looks almost pained. ‘Does it matter? Why are you annoying me with questions all the time?’

‘I don’t know why you’re so – weird, but maybe we can figure it out. Maybe then we can leave.’

Tony visibly goes still. He looks scared. ‘What do you mean, leave?’

Bruce gets up. He’s thought about this a lot. ‘You don’t want to stay here, do you?’

Tony looks hurt. ‘What’s wrong with staying?’

Bruce doesn’t get how Tony can even ask that. He wasn’t there when Bruce’s mom died, but he was there after. He saw the blood on the sidewalk. He saw how Bruce’s dad changed. How Bruce changed. ‘My mom died here. My dad lives here and he hates me.’

‘But _I’m_ here. We’re okay when we’re together, right?’ Tony puts his arms around Bruce. Bruce lets him, but keeps enough distance to be able to look at Tony.

‘I don’t know if I’ll ever be okay in this house. When I’m older, I want to leave.’

Tony looks close to tears. Bruce didn’t expect this to be so hard for Tony. ‘But I can’t leave.’

Bruce pulls out of Tony’s embrace. ‘We can figure out why! We can fix it!’

‘I don’t think we can. I don’t remember anything, Bruce, before you. I don’t remember who I was before you. I used to, but it’s all gone. I’ve always been here, I can’t leave.’ Tony’s hands are shaking. He doesn’t look good, too pale, too translucent. Bruce is scared he might flick away like he used do to years ago.

‘But you have to! I can’t stay here.’

Tony doesn’t say anything for a while. ‘We’ll figure it out. Just give me a hug, okay. We’ll figure it out later.’

Bruce does hug Tony, tightly.

He can’t imagine ever leaving him behind.


End file.
